RIP: Google Health-Another Cloud Service bites the dust.

After visiting my doctor, I pulled up my mobile browser and went to add in some details from my visit to my Google Health account and was surprised to see a notice that it would be discontinued soon. Google Health will be discontinued as a service. The product will continue service through January 1, 2012. After this date, you will no longer be able to view, enter or edit data stored in Google Health. You will be able to download the data you stored in Google Health, in a number of useful formats, through January 1, 2013.

If you have never heard of Google Health, you are part of the reason for it’s demise. Accordingly to the obituary posted on the Google Blog, it was the lack of adoption that led them to shut it down. As a side note, I do find it pretty interesting that Google with their endless money and side projects decided to bow out of the seemingly explosive healthcare space with this product without there being a clear winner in the market yet. I would think that the growth alone in this space would have been enough to keep the project alive.

Too Bad. I liked the service or at least had great hopes for it in the future. It was kind of like my Health 401k. I was dutifully contributing data now to hopefully reap rewards in the future. The goal that I appreciated with Google Health was that it allowed users to track their well being in a central/portable place. Various providers and devices could be pulled together to give you a holistic look at your well being and track your health history. I had linked my Fitbit (activity), CVS (prescriptions) and Quest (blood tests) all into the service. Unfortunately, the thing that would have probably saved the service was doctor participation and that never came through.

Fortunately for the few Google Health users among us, Google has set up a push button way of salvaging the data we have entered for safekeeping. We can either port any and all data from it’s service to another service (Microsoft’s HealthVault) or just download the data in a variety of easy to use formats. Since I really like the idea of a centralized repository for my Health records, I’ve chosen to port to MS HealthVault.